He hurried after her, but when he reached the glass doors in the lobby, someone tall grabbed his shoulders and jerked him back.
“Careful, son, that’s a busy street out there.” It was the doorman.
Jason’s mother had run, sobbing, into the arms of a pale-haired man. He’d tipped up her face and wiped at her cheekbones with his thumbs. Then he’d kissed her with a tenderness that made Jason feel sick, because the man wasn’t his dad.
The runaway couple had scrambled into a waiting cab as if they couldn’t escape fast enough. With a jolt, the vehicle had started forward, and his mother and the stranger had disappeared into the flow of traffic.
She’d never looked back.
She’d hardly ever called. Initially, his father had tried to make excuses for her. For that, Jason had been grateful, but that image of her grabbing her new man and running away from their life stuck in his head even today.
No explanations had ever been necessary.
She hadn’t loved his father or him enough to stay. His dad said staying in one place wasn’t her thing, and he couldn’t blame her for that when he suffered from the same affliction. But Jason had never understood what he’d done to make her leave him, too.
Finally, he’d told his dad he understood that his mother didn’t love him, and they’d never discussed her again. She’d called once or twice, and they’d talked like strangers. Then they’d stopped talking at all.
Tightening his jaw, Jason finally opened the ridiculously feminine envelope. A single page slid out onto the floor. He picked it up. Heavy writing had impressed the pale purple paper with a few lines that showed through the back of the sheet. He needn’t have dreaded a long explanation, or an excuse.
But how had she known where to find him? How long had she been keeping tabs on him?
He unfolded the piece of paper. She wrote the way she’d talked all those years ago, as if she still didn’t have a lot to say. Just his name, a diffident request to meet, “I want to talk to you,” and her phone number.
He’d had more emotional communication from the bank’s frightened clients. He dropped the brief note and envelope on a side table with his keys.
After all these years, that was her best effort?
Why now? Why here?
How badly did he want to know?
He changed into running clothes and headed downstairs. The slap of his shoes against the sidewalk felt good. The stretch of his muscles as he ran and the cold air biting into his face reminded him he was alive. He was working. Nothing here was permanent. He just had to keep running to put everything back into perspective.
But then he came to Fleming’s shop, where she was stringing lights along the window. For a second, he considered running on past, but he couldn’t leave her standing on a chair to handle the lights alone.
He stopped, breathing hard enough to cause a cloud of steam to form in front of his face. Fleming, tangled in lights, stared at him as if to ask what he wanted.
If she’d asked out loud, he wouldn’t have known how to answer. He wasn’t even certain how he’d ended up in the one place she was sure to be. “Why don’t you let me help you?”
She looked down at him, considering. “I can do this by myself.”
Ignoring her stubbornness, he put his hand on the back of the chair. “Do we really need this?” He reached up to the metal frame of the awning in front of Mainly Merry Christmas. It was about four inches higher than his fingertips. “I guess we do.”
He took off his hoodie so he could see what he was doing and traded places with Fleming on the chair, noticing as they passed each other, just shy of touching, that she couldn’t look away from him any more than he could tear his gaze from her.
Slowly, she handed him a roll of green duct tape that matched the awning. She’d been using it to fasten the light cords to the canvas. She lifted the string of lights, and he took it, leaning back to see how she’d been lining them up.
“Why are you angry with me, Fleming?”
“I’m not.” She said it in such a rush it was obviously untrue. “I’m sorry. Maybe I am lashing out a little, because I find myself in a bad situation.”
“You can afford this loan. You won’t lose the store.”
“Why are you so helpful? You act as if the bank’s at fault.”
“I guess it is.” He probably shouldn’t say that. “According to the attorneys, Paige kept the loans just this side of legal so they’d go through the system. He’ll be going to jail because he got greedy enough to skim the profits.”
“Otherwise, the bank would have been part of his scam,” she said.
“I guess my family does have a level we won’t stoop below.” Jason smiled, but he wasn’t entirely joking. “I’m helping you and everyone else he cheated because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s best for this town if all of you can continue to do business with Macland’s.”
“Now you sound like a commercial,” she said, with a smile that made him feel less insulted, more as if they were back on the shaky footing of their unacknowledged attraction.
“That burns a lot more than being called heartless.”
“You’re imagining things.” Briskly, she handed him the last of the lights, and he put them up, secured them with the heavy-duty tape, and then stepped off the chair.
“Want to turn them on?”
Nodding, she went inside and threw a switch. The lights began to twinkle just as a snowflake landed on his cheek. He looked up and saw blue-gray sky, but when he turned his head to look at the courthouse behind him, he saw more flakes, thickening in the air.
“Snow,” he said, as the shop bells jangled and Fleming rejoined him.
“About time. That should help everyone in business up here.”
He searched her face, impressed that he’d never heard panic in her voice, even the day she’d agreed to sign the loan.
“I swear you’re going to be okay,” he said, taking her hand. “I took into account the slow times. You’re in this for the long haul. If you were only looking to make a quick profit and turn the place over to a new owner, we would have discussed different terms.”
She nodded, tears pooling in her eyes. Her throat moved as she tried to swallow, and he pulled her closer still, wrapping one arm around her.
“Until you close on the loan, nothing is permanent.”
“I need to close. My life here is permanent.” She pressed her cheek to his chest. She was warm and alive and unguarded on this cold day, and she needed his comfort.
It was a potent combination, but when she said the word permanent, it reminded him who she was. He couldn’t tip up her face and kiss the generous mouth that haunted him when he should have been busy with his own plans. He couldn’t put his other arm around her and pretend they could be more than friends.
He did hit-and-run relationships with a mastery he’d learned at his father’s knee. Fleming was not a temporary kind of woman.
“Let me take your chair inside before it gets wet,” he said.
“I hope the snow now is a good sign for more to come.” She held the door, and he carried the chair past her.
Fleming followed him inside, but the bells on the door didn’t sound as cheery as now.
“You